UK ISP Timico Scraps Unmetered Offpeak Usage for Coms Customers

Former broadband customers of business ISP Coms (including many ex-ADSL24 subscribers), which was gobbled by Timico in a £2.5m deal during May 2015 (here), have been told that as part of the migration process they will lose their unmetered off-peak data allowance.

On top of that related customers will also no longer be able to use the pay-as-you-go broadband usage top-up facility, which means that from 1st November customers who use more bandwidth than is included in their monthly allowance will no longer have their line speeds restricted, but usage above the included allowance will be charged at £2.25 excluding VAT per GigaByte (not exactly the cheapest, but we’ve seen worse).

However it’s not all bad news and the information, which stems from a new email to Coms subscribers that began being distributed at the start of this month, also reveals that to compensate for these changes customers will be getting double their old usage allowance. But some package tiers appear to have been missed off the list.

Customer update: Timico acquisition of Coms.com

Some changes to broadband services

From 1st November 2015 we’re going to make some changes to broadband services to bring Coms broadband services in line with Timico broadband services.

Timico broadband usage allowances are measured 24 hours a day, whereas Coms broadband usage was only measured from 8am to 8pm. To compensate for this change we are increasing all broadband usage allowances as follows:

Current Coms broadband allowance	New Timico allowance from 1st Nov
30GB	60GB
50GB	100GB
100GB	200GB
500GB	Unlimited

We are also withdrawing the pay-as-you-go broadband usage top-up facility. From 1st November customers who use more bandwidth than is included in their monthly allowance will no longer have their line speeds restricted. Instead lines will continue to work normally but usage above the included allowance will be charged at £2.25 excluding VAT per GB. From 1st November our MyTimico portal will be available to you, so you can track usage levels and setup usage alerts. You can find out more about our Standard Charges and pricing on our website.

The letter also gives us a bit more context for Timico’s acquisition of the Coms base. At the time of the deal little was known about the precise reasoning for Coms’s decision to sell, although they had been going through some restructuring (they recently moved and consolidated their offices).

However Timico’s new letter states: “Coms was in financial and operational difficulties when we acquired their telecoms assets. We’re still unravelling some things, so we may not always have your details to hand if you get in touch. But over the next month we’ll keep you updated about moving your billing and services fully across to Timico.”

It’s also worth pointing out that not all of the Coms packages are covered in the list above, such as the entry-level services with smaller allowances (e.g. 10GB), and so we are left to assume that they will not benefit from the increase.